u/Aggressive_Ad_5454

I'm a plugin author, and have some users who want to use Git Updater rather than the w.org repo to update my stuff.

I'm looking for some "here's what you do, plugin author" documentation on this, and I'm coming up short.

Reading between the lines of the Git Updater documentation, it looks to me like installing a plugin with Git Updater copies the entire contents of the Primary branch: whatever header it finds in the main plugin file (or theme style.css).

And updating it compares the Version: 1.2.3 headers in the presently installed plugin and the Github (or Gitlab &c) repo.

It looks like Git Updater, unlike the w.org repo svn setup, doesn't use the Version 1.2.3 header to decide which tagged version to install. And unlike 10up's CI workflows, it looks like Git Updater doesn't honor .distignore, so it pulls unit tests and other build-time assets as well as runtime.

Is there a commonly accepted way of setting up for Git Update? Does anybody have any guidelines for that? Ideally, it would do more-or-less what the w.org repo does with tags. But I'll be happy with any convention that lots of people follow.

Thanks.

I've seen a few posts recently about things to keep in mind when creating new database applications. So here's my contribution.

Timezones are important in global database applications.

Figure out your timezone situation on your TIMESTAMP and DATETIME columns before you start storing data as your new application comes online. Retrofitting timezone support into existing databases is hard and error-prone.

If you're located in, I dunno, California USA, and you get customers in, I dunno, Perth Australia, and you don't figure out how you'll handle timezones, you'll end up with some unspeakably gnarly code.

Here are some things to think about doing in your database and the software using it.

1. Make sure the servers running your MariaDB or MySQL instance are set to the UTC (also called Zulu or Greenwich Mean Time) time zone. That doesn't change with daylight time.

2. Make sure the MariaDb / MySQL time zone tables are loaded. This web page tells you or your operations person how to do that. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/mysql-tzinfo-to-sql.html

3. When you go global, set up a user-preference setting for time zone. It's a text string like 'America/Los_Angeles' or 'Australia/Perth'. You can store that user preference in a column like this: user_timezone VARCHAR(63) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'America/Los_Angeles' COLLATE 'ascii_general_ci'. (You can give the time zone of your own location, or 'UTC', as the default, of course.)

4. When you start a database session from your app on behalf of a user, do SET TIMEZONE='America/Los_Angeles' or whatever your user's preference of time zone is.

5. Use TIMESTAMP columns to store timestamps rather than DATETIME columns. They're automatically translated to the current timezone setting.

Various general market hardware stores offer collections of T-handle hey keys for ~US$30. Park Tool offers a similar collection for ~US$120.

What’s better about the more expensive bike specialty tools? Harder metal? Ball ends? Blue handles?

Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, the American historian whose husband hauls lobster traps, yesterday posted a video where she said she won’t run for the US Senate seat. https://www.youtube.com/live/nkDRcv1pzT4?is=2b1GqoArll0O8KD5

This video is, IMO, worth the time it takes to watch it.

She makes the case that somebody should be able to take the seat from the incumbent. She makes the case for choosing a pol with Augusta experience.

There's a choral concert at 7pm at the First Congregational Church in Camden. The church is on Elm Street.

The Pen Bay Singers offer a program of American music, under the direction of Sierra Lary.

Frostiana is a song cycle of Robert Frost poem set to music by Randall Thompson. We'll sing that.

And there'll be music by Copeland, Berlin, Belfast's own Gladys Pitcher, Morton Lauridsen, and more.

Twenty bucks. A good time. Hope to see you.

(Disclosure: I'm a bass in the Pen Bay Singers.)

Is there a subreddit for bicyclists here in Maine?

Do you think there’s enough of us to make one work?

This is a well-reported article about the practical challenges of running food pantries. A lot of food-bank-sourced food is shelf stable, and that's obviously good. At the same time, an increasing amount of it -- produce, fish, meat -- comes frozen. If the pantries can keep it frozen until people take it home to use, that's great.

At AIO in Rockland, we're familiar with the words "scramble to get rid of perishable food quickly". We often are given good stuff (produce) that we can't freeze, so we "push" it quickly. The worst part of volunteering is carting perished food to the dumpster.

The thing they have up in the County about Canada-bound long-haul truckers donating excess product they don't need to carry across the border, that's great. It doesn't happen in Midcoast.

I uploaded a route yesterday 26-May-2026. It said that the estimated processing time is 7 days, then, and again today it says 7 days.

It's about 17 min of video material, comprising about 15km of riding distance.

I uploaded another, longer, route last Friday 22-May-2026, and it finished processing in a reasonable time.

By the way, I love this feature!